Abstract: Federace židovských obcí v České republice (dále jen FŽO) zaznamenala v roce 2023 celkem 4 328 antisemitských incidentů. Ve srovnání s rokem 2022, kdy bylo registrováno 2 277 incidentů, tak došlo k nárůstu o 90 %. Rok 2023 tedy znovu potvrdil konstantní trend dramatického nárůstu antisemitismu.
Shromážděná data nejsou úplným statistickým přehledem všech antisemitských incidentů za rok 2023. FŽO čerpá informace výlučně z otevřených zdrojů, které zahrnují pouze malý výsek popisované reality. Počet registrovaných incidentů závisí rovněž na ochotě a možnostech obětí i svědků projevy antisemitismu hlásit. V České republice, stejně jako v jiných zemích, přetrvává nedostatečná míra nahlašování nenávistných činů, často kvůli stigmatizaci, nedůvěře v instituce nebo obavám o osobní bezpečnost. Statistiky FŽO neumí odpovědět na otázku, jaká část české populace smýšlí či jedná antisemitsky, vypovídají však o trendech v jeho vnímání a o společenském klimatu ve vztahu k protižidovské předsudečné nenávisti. K antisemitsky motivovanému fyzickému násilí dochází v České republice pouze výjimečně. V posledních pěti letech byly FŽO nahlášeny dva násilné útoky (2020, 2021). V roce 2023 nebylo evidováno žádné napadení. Z hlediska fyzické bezpečnosti zůstala v roce 2023 Česká republika pro židovskou komunitu bezpečnou zemí.
Témata, motivy a rychlost šíření antisemitismu ovlivňovala řada domácích a zahraničních událostí. Až do samého konce roku 2023 se objevovaly antisemitské narativy spojené s ruskou vojenskou agresí proti Ukrajině i s doznívající pandemií nemoci covid-19. Jednoznačným zlomem se stal 7. říjen 2023, kdy palestinské teroristické organizace pod vedením Hamásu zaútočily z Pásma Gazy proti civilním a vojenským cílům v jižním Izraeli. Bezprecedentní útok zahájil válku mezi Izraelem a Hamásem. Bezprostředně po 7. říjnu následovala celosvětová explozivní vlna antisemitismu, která silně zasáhla i Českou republiku.
Měsíční statistiky zcela jednoznačně dokládají masivní nárůst antisemitismu v posledním čtvrtletí roku 2023. Za období leden–září bylo registrováno 2 528 incidentů, tj. 58,41 % celkového počtu, za období říjen–prosinec pak dalších 1 800 incidentů, které představují 41,59 % celkového počtu. Pro období leden–září 2023 platí, že průměrný měsíční nárůst v porovnání s rokem 2022 činil 50,03 %. V období říjen–prosinec byl průměrný nárůst 254,32 %.
Z hlediska šíření antisemitismu došlo v posledních pěti letech k aktivizaci všech hlavních ideologických proudů. Do roku 2019 představoval největší hrozbu pro židovskou komunitu pravicový extremismus. V letech 2020–2023 v souvislosti s pandemií nemoci covid-19 a s ruskou agresí proti Ukrajině významně posílil vliv dezinformačních platforem. Po teroristickém útoku 7. října akcelerovaly aktivity krajní levice a islamismu. Protižidovská nenávist zejména v podobě démonizace a delegitimizace Státu Izrael v roce 2023 masivně vstoupila do veřejného prostoru a stala se společensky přijatelným postojem. Stoupala agresivita antisemitských incidentů, které byly čím dál častěji adresovány konkrétním osobám či institucím. Protižidovské postoje přejímalo a šířilo stále více jednotlivců, kteří jinak neprojevovali žádné sympatie k politickému či ideologickému extremismu. Závěr roku 2023 tak přinesl zcela nový trend normalizace antisemitismu.
Abstract: The Sixth Survey of European Jewish Community Leaders and Professionals, 2024, presents the results of an online survey offered in 10 languages and administered to 879 respondents in 31 countries. Conducted every three years using the same format, the survey seeks to identify trends and their evolution over time.
The 2024 survey came during a historically fraught moment for the Jewish people globally. The impact of the horrific October 7th attacks and the subsequent war in Israel cannot be understated. How is this affecting Jewish leadership and Jewish communal life? Therefore, in addition to the regular topics covered by the survey (community priorities, threats, security concerns, attitudes towards Europe and Israel), this edition included a special section designed to understand the impact of October 7th on Jewish life in Europe.
That October 7th has profoundly affected Jewish Europe is evident across multiple sections throughout the survey. Concern about antisemitism and the threat of physical attack has intensified. A large majority of 78% feel less safe living as Jews in their cities than they did before the Hamas attack, and respondents are more cautious about how they identify themselves as Jews. They are also more distant from their wider environments, with 38% reporting they have become more distant from non-Jewish friends.
The respondents were comprised of presidents and chairpersons of nationwide “umbrella organizations” or Federations; presidents and executive directors of private Jewish foundations, charities, and other privately funded initiatives; presidents and main representatives of Jewish communities that are organized at a city level; executive directors and programme coordinators, as well as current and former board members of Jewish organizations; among others
Abstract: FRA’s third survey on discrimination and hate crime against Jews in the EU reveals their experiences and perceptions of antisemitism, and shows the obstacles they face in living an openly Jewish life.
The survey pre-dates the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s military response in Gaza. But the report includes information about antisemitism collected from 12 Jewish community organisations more recently. Jewish people have experienced more antisemitic incidents since October 2023, with some organisations reporting an increase of more than 400%.
The survey results point to:
Rising antisemitism: 80% of respondents feel that antisemitism has grown in their country in the five years before the survey.
High levels of antisemitism online: 90% of respondents encountered antisemitism online in the year before the survey.
Antisemitism in the public sphere: in the year before the survey, 56% of respondents encountered offline antisemitism from people they know and 51% in the media.
Harassment: 37% say they were harassed because they are Jewish in the year before the survey. Most of them experienced harassment multiple times. Antisemitic harassment and violence mostly take place in streets, parks, or shops.
Safety and security concerns: Most respondents continue to worry for their own (53%) and their family’s (60%) safety and security. Over the years, FRA research has shown that antisemitism tends to increase in times of tension in the Middle East. In this survey, 75% feel that people hold them responsible for the Israeli government’s actions because they are Jewish.
Hidden lives: 76% hide their Jewish identity at least occasionally and 34% avoid Jewish events or sites because they do not feel safe. As a reaction to online antisemitism, 24% avoid posting content that would identify them as Jewish, 23% say that they limited their participation in online discussions, and 16% reduced their use of certain platforms, websites or services.
The EU and its Member States have put in place measures against antisemitism, which have led to some progress. These include the EU’s first ever strategy on combating antisemitism and action plans in some EU countries. The report suggests concrete ways for building on that progress:
Monitoring and adequately funding antisemitism strategies and action plans: This includes adopting plans in those EU countries which do not have them and developing indicators to monitor progress.
Securing the safety and security of Jewish communities: Countries need to invest more in protecting Jewish people, working closely with the affected communities.
Tackling antisemitism online: Online platforms need to address and remove antisemitic content online, to adhere tothe EU’s Digital Services Act. They also need to better investigate and prosecute illegal antisemitic content online.
Encouraging reporting and improving recording of antisemitism: National authorities should step up efforts to raise rights awareness among Jews, encourage them to report antisemitic incidents and improve the recording of such incidents. Greater use of third-party and anonymous reporting could help.
The survey covers Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain and Sweden where around 96% of the EU’s estimated Jewish population live. Almost 8,000 Jews aged 16 or over took part in the online survey from January to June 2023. This is the third survey of its kind, following those of 2013 and 2018.
Abstract: The present report provides an overview of data on antisemitism as recorded by international organisations and by official and unofficial sources in the European Union (EU) Member States. Furthermore, the report includes data concerning the United Kingdom, which in 2019 was still a Member State of the EU. For the first time, the report also presents available statistics and other information with respect to North Macedonia and Serbia, as countries with an observer status to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). All data presented in the report are based on the respective countries’ own definitions and categorisations of antisemitic behaviour. At the same time, an increasing number of countries are using the working definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and there are efforts to further improve hate crime data collection in the EU, including through the work of the Working Group on hate crime recording, data collection and encouraging reporting (2019–2021), which FRA facilitates. ‘Official data’ are understood in the context of this report as those collected by law enforcement agencies, other authorities that are part of criminal justice systems and relevant state ministries at national level. ‘Unofficial data’ refers to data collected by civil society organisations.
This annual overview provides an update on the most recent figures on antisemitic incidents, covering the period 1 January 2009 – 31 December 2019, across the EU Member States, where data are available. It includes a section that presents the legal framework and evidence from international organisations. The report also provides an overview of national action plans and other measures to prevent and combat antisemitism, as well as information on how countries have adopted or endorsed the non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) (2016) as well as how they use or intend to use it.
This is the 16th edition of FRA’s report on the situation of data collection on antisemitism in the EU (including reports published by FRA’s predecessor, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia).
Abstract: Federace židovských obcí v České republice (FŽO) zaznamenala v roce 2022 celkem 2 277 antisemitských incidentů. Konstantní trend skokového nárůstu počtu projevů antisemitismu, který byl jasně patrný v předchozích sledovaných obdobích, tak zůstal zachován i v loňském roce. Ve srovnání s rokem 2021, kdy bylo zaznamenáno 1128 antisemitských incidentů, lze tento trend navíc označit přívlastkem dramatický.
Drtivá většina všech zaznamenaných antisemitských incidentů, celkem 97 %, tvoří projevy nenávisti na internetu. Vedle článků, grafických materiálů, anonymních komentářů a diskusních příspěvků šlo především o sociální sítě, na nichž bylo zachyceno přes 74% všech on-line incidentů. V dlouhodobé perspektivě jsou právě sociální sítě dominantní hostitelskou platformou produkce a šíření antisemitismu i nenávisti obecně a významnou měrou přispívají k narůstající polarizaci společnosti.
Navzdory skutečnosti, že počet registrovaných incidentů meziročně vzrostl o více než 100 %, stejně jako v uplynulých letech platí konstatování, že případy otevřeně antisemitsky motivovaného násilí jsou v České republice nadále zaznamenávány jen výjimečně. V roce 2022 nebyl FŽO nahlášen žádný případ fyzického napadení. Dále byly v roce 2022 zaznamenány 2 případy vandalismu na židovských objektech, což odpovídá předchozím rokům. Naopak 10 zaznamenaných případů vyhrožování představuje dvojnásobný nárůst oproti roku 2021. V této souvislosti je však nutné znovu připomenout, že oběti či svědkové projevů antisemitsky motivované předsudečné nenávisti se mnohdy rozhodnou tyto činy nenahlásit příslušným orgánům nebo si z různých důvodů nepřejí sdělovat detaily svých negativních zkušeností. Ačkoliv tedy FŽO od roku 2018 ve svých statistikách pracuje s pouhými jednotkami protižidovsky zaměřených násilných činů, je pravděpodobné, že skutečný počet podobných případů bývá každoročně vyšší.
Obsah registrovaných protižidovských incidentů neprošel v roce 2022 ve srovnání s předchozími lety zásadní proměnou. Projevy předsudečné nenávisti vždy korelují s celkovou atmosférou ve společnosti, kterou formují lokální události i globální geopolitické a ekonomické faktory. Obsah, formu i množství antisemitských narativů tak v loňském roce vedle doznívající pandemie onemocnění covid-19 ovlivňovala zejména ruská agrese vůči Ukrajině, včetně související ekonomické, energetické a surovinové krize, a v neposlední řadě i přetrvávající napětí na Blízkém východě v kontextu izraelsko-palestinského konfliktu.
Z analýzy dosavadních útoků motivovaných předsudečnou nenávistí jednoznačně vyplývá, že internet a zejména virtuální komunikační platformy hrají dominantní roli v procesu radikalizace jednotlivců i skupin a současně usnadňují potenciálním útočníkům plánování a přípravu násilných trestných činů. Platnost tohoto pozorování potvrdil střelecký útok, k němuž došlo 12. října 2022 u baru Tepláreň v Bratislavě, a který si vyžádal dvě oběti. Pachatel se na svůj čin podle vlastních slov systematicky a dlouhodobě připravoval a na sociálních sítích sdílel velké množství nenávistných a konspirativních příspěvků. Ačkoliv v ČR nebyl v roce 2022 zaznamenán žádný srovnatelný incident, globální kontext přetrvávajících obav z radikalizace v on-line prostředí zůstává nadále vysoce aktuální.
Více než třetina z celkového počtu incidentů, s nimiž FŽO v roce 2022 pracovala, pocházela z ideologických pozic krajní pravice. U druhé třetiny projevů antisemitismu nebylo možné jednoznačně určit ideologické pozadí, neboť autoři či šiřitelé těchto incidentů nedeklarují žádné extrémní politické postoje. Nárůst celkového objemu zaznamenaných dat se však z hlediska ideologie nejvýrazněji projevil v případě dezinformačních platforem. Už v předchozích čtyřech sledovaných obdobích docházelo v této oblasti ke kontinuálnímu nárůstu, v roce 2022 je však doložen více než 200% skokový výkyv. Zatímco v roce 2021 pocházelo z dezinformačních platforem 14,4 % všech registrovaných incidentů, v roce 2022 tyto platformy zveřejnily 24,5 % všech evidovaných projevů antisemitismu. Vzhledem ke vzrůstající aktivitě a popularitě dezinformačních médií a masivní akceleraci šíření konspiračních obsahů jde o nepřekvapivé, přesto však mimořádně znepokojivé zjištění. Dezinformační hnutí přispívají k polarizaci společnosti a mají potenciál destruktivně působit na základní demokratické ústavní principy.
Přes závažnost některých závěrů je možné opět konstatovat, že Česká republika představuje pro židovskou komunitu bezpečnou zemi. Projevy antisemitismu ventilované v internetovém prostředí však představují z dlouhodobého hlediska trend, kterému je nezbytné věnovat zvýšenou pozornost.
Abstract: This mapping report examines the Visegrad Group countries’ policies relating to remembrance and education about the Holocaust and antisemitism (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). The report draws on the studies on antisemitism published in the region and the interviews conducted with experts, researchers, pioneers, teachers, and Jewish community members.
The study consists of five sections. Section 1 provides background information and introduces the reader to relevant policies and penal measures. Section 2 examines Holocaust commemoration activities, and Section 3 looks at relevant government policies, including textbooks, curricula, and teacher training. Finally, Section 4 introduces civil society good practices, and Section 5 shares recommendations for authorities and civil society.
Abstract: The Fifth Survey of European Jewish Community Leaders and Professionals, 2021 presents the results of an online survey offered in 10 languages and administered to 1054 respondents in 31 countries. Conducted every three years using the same format, the survey seeks to identify trends and their evolution in time.
Even if European Jewish leaders and community professionals rank antisemitism and combatting it among their first concerns and priorities, they are similarly committed to expanding Jewish communities and fostering future sustainability by engaging more young people and unaffiliated Jews.
The survey covers a wide variety of topics including the toll of COVID-19 on European Jewish communities and a widening generational gap around pivotal issues. Conducted every three years since 2008, the study is part of JDC’s wider work in Europe, which includes its partnerships with local Jewish communities and programs aiding needy Jews, fostering Jewish life and leaders, resilience training.
The respondents were comprised of presidents and chairpersons of nationwide “umbrella organizations” or Federations; presidents and executive directors of private Jewish foundations, charities, and other privately funded initiatives; presidents and main representatives of Jewish communities that are organized at a city level; executive directors and programme coordinators, as well as current and former board members of Jewish organizations; among others.
The JDC International Centre for Community Development established the survey as a means to identify the priorities, sensibilities and concerns of Europe’s top Jewish leaders and professionals working in Jewish institutions, taking into account the changes that European Jewry has gone through since 1989, and the current political challenges and uncertainties in the continent. In a landscape with few mechanisms that can truly gauge these phenomena, the European Jewish Community Leaders Survey is an essential tool for analysis and applied research in the field of community development.
Abstract: Many in Europe today are concerned about the rise in violence against Jews, which clearly raises fears in Jewish communities on the Continent. Neither Jewish communities nor individual Jews can be protected unless there is data on antisemitic incidents and scientifically thorough situation analysis. We need to know and analyze the current social attitudes related to antisemitism, to the coexistence with Jews, mutually held prejudices, related taboos in a representative sample of the European countries’ population.
This is the reason why we have launched the largest European antisemitism survey. The research, initiated by the Action and Protection League and carried out by the polling companies Ipsos and Inspira, aims to provide a comprehensive picture of antisemitic prejudice in 16 countries in the European Union.
Data were collected between December 2019 and January 2020 in 16 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom. 1000 people were surveyed in each country.
We used a total of 24 questions to measure antisemitism. We measured the cognitive and conative dimensions of prejudice with 10 questions, and three additional questions for the affective dimension of antisemitism, that is, to measure the emotional charge of antisemitic prejudice. We mapped secondary antisemitism relativizing the Holocaust with seven questions and antisemitic hostility against Israel with four questions. We used two and three questions, respectively, to measure sympathy for Jews and for Israel.
With the exception of questions about affective antisemitism, all questions were asked in the same form: Respondents were asked to indicate on a five-point scale how much they agreed with the statements in the question (strongly agree; tend to agree; neither agree nor disagree; tend to disagree; strongly disagree).
Abstract: Many in Europe today are concerned about the rise in violence against Jews, which clearly raises fears in Jewish communities on the Continent. Neither Jewish communities nor individual Jews can be protected unless there is data on antisemitic incidents and scientifically thorough situation analysis. We need to know and analyze the current social attitudes related to antisemitism, to the coexistence with Jews, mutually held prejudices, related taboos in a representative sample of the European countries’ population.
This is the reason why we have launched the largest European antisemitism survey. The research, initiated by the Action and Protection League and carried out by the polling companies Ipsos and Inspira, aims to provide a comprehensive picture of antisemitic prejudice in 16 countries in the European Union.
Data were collected between December 2019 and January 2020 in 16 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom. 1000 people were surveyed in each country.
We used a total of 24 questions to measure antisemitism. We measured the cognitive and conative dimensions of prejudice with 10 questions, and three additional questions for the affective dimension of antisemitism, that is, to measure the emotional charge of antisemitic prejudice. We mapped secondary antisemitism relativizing the Holocaust with seven questions and antisemitic hostility against Israel with four questions. We used two and three questions, respectively, to measure sympathy for Jews and for Israel.
With the exception of questions about affective antisemitism, all questions were asked in the same form: Respondents were asked to indicate on a five-point scale how much they agreed with the statements in the question (strongly agree; tend to agree; neither agree nor disagree; tend to disagree; strongly disagree).
Abstract: Travelogue – On the Contemporary Understandings of Citizenship among European Jews – title and subject of Theodor Barth’s thesis – encompasses six books with ethnography based on a multi-sited fieldwork, in Central- & Eastern European Jewish communities.
The books are concerned with aspects of their own conditions of production, from fieldwork research to writing, alongside the ethnographic subject of the Travelogue: the conditions of Jewish communities (mainly in cities of Central and Eastern Europe) in the last half of the 1990s (1995-99).
The books root the model experiments developed throughout the Travelogue in different ethnographic contexts.
Book 1 (Spanning the Fringes – Vagrancy to Prague) is a traveller’s tale with quite contingent, serendipitous, and very short-term trips to sample Jewish life in St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Warsaw, Kiev, Bucharest, Sofia, and Budapest.
Book 2 (The Minutes of the ECJC) is a commentary and analysis around a conference which the candidate attended in Prague in 1995 of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC). It focuses on the political work and changing strategies of the ECJC. This book establishes some of the terms of the problems of community-Jews in Europe.
Book 3 (The Zagreb Almanach) is a description and analysis of the candidate’s stay with the Jewish community of Zagreb, focusing on a place, a green room, the community centre itself—this is the closest to a traditional site of community living in his ethnographic research.
Book 4 (The Books of Zagreb and Sarajevo) provides a contemporary and contextualized reading of a key Jewish ritual complex—the Passover Seder and its text, the Haggadah. This is a cultural object for systematic iteration and commentary, on which to articulate in depth a number of his insights gained more diffusely from observation. Among all the books, book 4 is the one intensive piece in which the textual analysis defines a process through which the candidate intends to sensitise the reader to how pattern can emerge from details.
Book 5 (Thirteen Kisses—a Manual of Survival From Sarajevo) relates a testimonial account of how the activist group La Benevolencija functioned in Sarajevo humanitarian relief during the Bosnian War of 1992-95. The candidate hopes to demonstrate a slow transition from wartime testimonials in the presence of an anthropologist, to recognition in the urban commonwealth in the aftermath of the war. He also invites the reader to consider the particularities of survivor testimonies and contrast these to how the war-zone was perceived from the outside.
Book 6 (The Account of the Lifeline) provides an understanding of a search and accountability model developed by La Benevolencija—in co-operation with the Joint—during the war in Bosnia (1992-95). It consolidates and expands the account of the Jews in Sarajevo and their humanitarian actions, through the candidate’s work on archives of the Joint (American Joint Distribution Committee) in Paris.
The six books of the Travelogue are rounded up in three concluding sections, containing 1) a synopsis of the findings across the books (Frames – Modeling Disordered Systems), 2) an account for the process of visual modeling throughout the books (Design – Choices and Aggregates), 3) a bibliographic presentation in which various sources influenced the conceptual choices and experiments that are made throughout the manuscript are discussed (Bibliography: Reflective Readings). In this way, the candidate hopes to retrace his steps from the findings, via the crafting of the volume back to the ranks of colleagues and readers.
Abstract: This thesis analyses three Central European countries – Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary - and their relations with Israel. I chose these three Central European countries because they share the same geopolitical space and historical experience. These three Central European countries and Israel are geographically distant, face different geopolitical threats, and have only a few policy issues in common. Nonetheless, ‘the question of Israel’ has been very much present in the foreign policies of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Building on constructivism and IR scholarship that engages with memory studies, this thesis explores the process of national identity re-formation and its impact on the formulation of national interest. Specifically, it focuses on: a) past legacies, institutionalized in collective memory and expressed in narratives, which linger over and constrain policy choices; b) the role of decision-makers with a special focus on their role in national identity re-formation in times when a policy is in transition and when a new regime must establish its legitimacy. I look at the historical roots of the relations of the three Central European countries with Israel. I do so by analysing the role of the Jewish question in the nation-building process of Polish, Czech, and Hungarian nations. Further, I argue that as the three former Communist countries started to re-define their relations with Israel, the legacy of the Jewish question has had a significant impact on the formulation of their foreign policies towards the Jewish state.
Abstract: Rozsáhlá monografie odborníků z pražské právnické fakulty pod vedením Jana Kuklíka a Reného Petráše se věnuje problému majetkových ztrát židovského obyvatelstva za druhé světové války a různým metodám odškodnění. Publikace má široký historický a komparativní záběr, obsahuje podrobnou analýzu právních aspektů a zabývá se i dodnes nedořešenými otázkami. Nejpodrobněji je v knize zastoupeno území bývalého Československa, ale pozornost je věnována i vývoji v dalších státech: Německu, Rakousku, Polsku, ale také v zemích s velmi odlišnou situací, jako jsou Velká Británie, Bulharsko či Švýcarsko. Výklad u jednotlivých států obvykle zahrnuje nástin vývoje postavení Židů v daném regionu v posledních desetiletích před holocaustem, jsou však naznačeny i starší, středověké tradice. Jádrem práce je zachycení často až pozoruhodně různorodých metod záborů židovského majetku zejména v době druhé světové války a jeho restitucí nebo různých odškodňovacích akcí, které probíhají až do současnosti.
Abstract: This detailed and thorough report is rapidly becoming the ‘must-read’ study on European Jews, taking the reader on an extraordinary journey through one thousand years of European Jewish history before arriving at the most comprehensive analysis of European Jewish demography today.
Written by leading Jewish demographers Professor Sergio DellaPergola and Dr Daniel Staetsky, the Chair and Director of JPR’s European Jewish Demography Unit respectively, it explores how the European Jewish population has ebbed and flowed over time. It begins as far back as the twelfth century, travelling through many years of population stability, until the tremendous growth of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by the dramatic decline prompted by a combination of mass migration and the horrors of the Shoah. Extraordinarily, after all this time, the proportion of world Jewry living in Europe today is almost identical to the proportion living in Europe 900 years ago.
Using multiple definitions of Jewishness and a vast array of sources to determine the size of the contemporary population, the study proceeds to measure it in multiple ways, looking at the major blocs of the European Union and the European countries of the Former Soviet Union, as well as providing country-by-country analyses, ranging from major centres such as France, the UK, Germany and Hungary, to tiny territories such as Gibraltar, Monaco and even the Holy See.
The report also contains the most up-to-date analysis we have on the key mechanisms of demographic change in Europe, touching variously on patterns of migration in and out of Europe, fertility, intermarriage, conversion and age compositions. While the report itself is a fascinating and important read, the underlying data are essential tools for the JPR team to utilise as it supports Jewish organisations across the continent to plan for the future.
